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 Wielding Wikipedia • Inside Higher Ed |
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| thekohser |
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Comment: QUOTE Wikipedia's rules broken Posted by Gregory Kohs , Founder at Wikipedia Review.com on April 5, 2011 at 8:30am EDT Wikipedia's guidelines say: "A Wikipedia conflict of interest (COI) is an incompatibility between the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia, and the aims of an individual editor. COI editing involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups. Where advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest." Sounds like Houston's outside interests were more important to Danielle Elder than advancing the aims of Wikipedia. When will Elder be brought before Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee for punishment? Or, will this situation be "overlooked" by the Wikipedia community, because it seems to enhance Wikipedia's reputation among academia? If Wal-Mart or if Koch Industries have lovely collections of photos, will their content and links be welcomed on Wikipedia? There is a lovely history of Brandywine Springs found here: http://www.wikipediareview.com/Brandywine_SpringsI challenge Danielle Elder to place a link to that page in Wikipedia's paltry article about Brandywine Springs. See how long it lasts there. As always with Wikipedia, rules are for bludgeoning some and for coddling others. |
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| lilburne |
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QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 6th April 2011, 2:58pm)  QUOTE
Some libraries burn more slowly than others …
Any institution wanting to make their digital collection available to a wider audience should really be adding the collection to the The Commons. Not to some piss poor wankingversion of it. This post has been edited by lilburne: |
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| thekohser |
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Good point: QUOTE Wikipedia contribution CAN be negative for professionals
Posted by Seth Finkelstein on April 6, 2011 at 7:00am EDT
Disclaimer/Declaration: I'm a long time critic of Wikipedia, and have written columns about it as a cult and exploitation.
To answer Texas Librarian's point - "Having said that, contributions from professional editors such as librarians and scholars can only serve to make Wikipedia more reliable, robust, and trustworthy as a resource. I therefore find it inconceivable that anyone would object to such contributions.". This is not true. Contributions can be ground up by cranks and martinets, wasting the expert labor, while the fact of the contribution itself used as part of PR campaign, leading to loss both ways. So it's certainly *conceivable* to object. You might reply this doesn't happen, but it's not difficult to see it as a possibility. The way in which that scenario might cause people to have more trust in untrustworthy articles should definitely give pause. In effect, this is the problem of a high reputation entity being used to give a favorable impression of a low reputation one.
When you say "If we can't stop them from using it in this manner, then our best course of action is to contribute to Wikipedia as often as possible, and to help make the information in Wikipedia as reliable as we possibly can." - no, I disagree. That can easily turn into "enabling" behavior of Wikipedia's dysfunction. Or at least, if you're going to do that, make it very clear that it's bailing out a fundamentally flawed system, and by no means let it actually end up rewarded for its failings! Facepalm: QUOTE Good Points...
Posted by A Texas Librarian on April 6, 2011 at 6:45pm EDT
Seth: You make some good points. Anyone can come along and undo your hard work, if they possess the inclination and malevolence to do so.
I have often pondered ways to fix that problem, without restricting access to a limited number of editors.
One thing I thought of recently was this: a seniority system. The way it would work is that editors who contribute quality work can build up a certain level of seniority, and those people wishing to edit an article created by that editor would need to hold equal or greater seniority. To provide a check and balance, editors with less seniority could "pool" their rankings in order to compensate for this. Of course, the major flaw is that a hacker could conceivably change his account to falsify his seniority level, or groups of cranks could pool their seniority in order to attack various articles. There would need to be some way to track seniority ratings that would allow Wikipedia to detect (and subsequently ban the IP of) anyone whose seniority level changes dramatically in a short period of time, or to detect the same group of people pooling their seniority over and over in order to "grind up" articles.
Of course, I realize that this is simply trading one headache for another. That's the reason why Wikipedia will never replace in-print resources like Britannica.
Who will determine what is quality work? Will the List of Pokemon Characters article be considered high quality? What about the articles created by editors who are long gone? What about articles created by now-banned editors? If less-senior editors "pool" rankings, will that be facilitated by off-wiki canvassing? When the IP of a "hacker" is banned, what happens when that "hacker" unplugs his DSL modem and plugs it back in? How does it follow that Britannica will survive? What form of capital punishment should be meted out on "A Texas Librarian" -- firing squad, gas chamber, hanging, or electric chair? |
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| Milton Roe |
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 6th April 2011, 5:51pm) Facepalm: QUOTE Good Points...
Posted by A Texas Librarian on April 6, 2011 at 6:45pm EDT
Seth: You make some good points. Anyone can come along and undo your hard work, if they possess the inclination and malevolence to do so.
I have often pondered ways to fix that problem, without restricting access to a limited number of editors.
One thing I thought of recently was this: a seniority system. The way it would work is that editors who contribute quality work can build up a certain level of seniority, and those people wishing to edit an article created by that editor would need to hold equal or greater seniority. To provide a check and balance, editors with less seniority could "pool" their rankings in order to compensate for this. Of course, the major flaw is that a hacker could conceivably change his account to falsify his seniority level, or groups of cranks could pool their seniority in order to attack various articles. There would need to be some way to track seniority ratings that would allow Wikipedia to detect (and subsequently ban the IP of) anyone whose seniority level changes dramatically in a short period of time, or to detect the same group of people pooling their seniority over and over in order to "grind up" articles.
Of course, I realize that this is simply trading one headache for another. That's the reason why Wikipedia will never replace in-print resources like Britannica.
Who will determine what is quality work? Will the List of Pokemon Characters article be considered high quality? What about the articles created by editors who are long gone? What about articles created by now-banned editors? If less-senior editors "pool" rankings, will that be facilitated by off-wiki canvassing? When the IP of a "hacker" is banned, what happens when that "hacker" unplugs his DSL modem and plugs it back in? How does it follow that Britannica will survive? What form of capital punishment should be meted out on "A Texas Librarian" -- firing squad, gas chamber, hanging, or electric chair? Oh, come on. You don't like the fact that such a system was not in place when YOU needed it, so now you want to shoot (gas,hang,fry) the messenger (or in this case, the newb thinker in Texas). If such a rep system got going for username accounts (nevermind the IPs), then it could actually work. We don't judge "quality," we merely judge number of keystroke edits that stays in WP for longer than some X time-- say 30 days. Then, multiply by the number of pageviews after that that the article with the addition gets, so you don't get the same points for (say) adding crap ala Blofeld to a stub that nobody reads, as you would do for (say) fixing an error in United States of America. The rep of an given "account" (nameuser with strong password) then is some function of that magic number, which is integrated and tabulated over time for each account. You could keep track of it with a .....COMPUTER! I hear they're getting fast. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif) The way this would work, is that once a nameuser passes a certain number of good edits which survive in a certain number of articles that get a certain number of pageviews, they become unblockable by a single admin, and now it takes two. At some further level, it takes 3, then 4, then 5. Or one steward or something. And so on. If you really want to make this a fun game, you carry this number around with you, and it shows up like Milton Roe (T-C-L-K-R-D)
(5 million) every time you sign in with the 4 tildes ~~~~. Now you're getting somewhere. Then we take the next step, and disconnect the whole problem of trying to figure out what person in meatspace is operating which account, because we basically don't care. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) Since it's impossible to really know that, anyway, without the sorts of invasions of privacy that only Dept of Homeland Security can do, and certainly not Wikipedia. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif) So now, somebody raises hand: zOMG, what if we think from checkuser data that the user:Cool3 account (500,000) is operated by GRAWP or Kort or somebody that WP loves to hate? Hershel, say. What do we DO??? Answer, nothing. If the account has not been misbehaving, and has a lot of added-content reputation, then there's not much point in doing anything. If the quality of WP is actually what you're really after as a primary goal, you don't care if the Devil Himself is adding quality content that lasts.WP:IAR MOFO. Yes, this takes some of the revenge-machine out of things. But on the other hand, it adds another dimension to the MMPORPG, does it not. It could come out even. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) |
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| Jon Awbrey |
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QUOTE
Knowledge Ecology : Sustainable and Unsustainable
A friendly but brutally honest critic tells me that I would serve the interests of this discussion a little better if I made an effort to explain my so far “oblique†remarks. So let me try to do that now.
My education taught to me think in terms of whole systems, in a word, “ecologiesâ€, and that includes systems of cultural transmission in the same vein as all the more basic natural systems. That kind of thinking values the living activities that produce cultural artifacts as much as it values the products themselves. If we care about preserving culture as anything more than a dead archeological repository, then we have to care about the process, too.
Next time, let us bring that insight to bear on the question at hand, namely, the proper relation of the libraries that most of us know and love to the exponents of ephemeral social media that exploit the eminently erasable wiki paradigm.
— Jon Awbrey • 12 Apr 2011 (9:30 pm)
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| Jon Awbrey |
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I still can't figure out why any news organization that even pretends to have a stake in higher education would still be putting out so many puff pieces about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation after all these years. In my quest for understanding I took a look at their “About†page, where we find the following information: QUOTE
Inside Higher Ed was founded in 2004 by three executives with decades of expertise in higher education journalism and recruitment. We believed that higher education was evolving quickly and radically, and that the time was right for new models of providing information and career services for professionals in academe.
Here's a salient excerpt from their statement of principles: QUOTE
We take our watchdog role seriously and will do plenty of hard-hitting investigative reporting, sparing no sacred cows.
On their Staff Page, we find the information that Inside Higher Ed was founded by Kathlene Collins, Scott Jaschik, and Doug Lederman, all three formerly of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Their bios are a bit fuzzy on their precise backgrounds, but it looks like they lean toward the accounting, advertising, athletic reporting, and recruitment end of the business, a trend that is borne out by the rest of the staff listed on that page. |
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| Jon Awbrey |
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 13th April 2011, 10:26am) Jon, if you want a write-up on the story of how Inside Higher Ed was created, see this. I think as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the media is just doing their usual Enron coverage. Lots and lots of puff pieces about how this “amazing†juggernaut has “vaulted†in the “Top 10†… until the shit hits the fan, everyone realizes they've been “dupedâ€, and then story after story about the “fraudâ€, “mismanagementâ€, and “corruption†that hardly anyone saw brewing. Thanks, Greg, that explains a lot. The Chronicle is mostly used for its placement ads. The average academic will take out a home subscription for the length of time it takes to find a new job, and otherwise be content to glance at the odd copy that some departmental routing list eventually dumps in the coffee room. Its articles have long been the haunt of junior journalism types and no one takes it very seriously. It looks like Inside Higher Ed is dedicating itself to that same fine tradition of irrelevance. Jon (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif) |
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